I switched online brokers a few months ago to take advantage of Questrade’s bonus offer. The amount of money to switch was sufficiently attractive to tackle the not-insignificant hassle of going through with it1.
Shortly after getting started, I posted a short “unboxing” review, but now that I’ve been using Questrade for a few months I can provide a bit more detail.
It’s probably worth stating that my needs for an online broker are pretty simple and straightforward.
- I hate paying fees.
- I’m a buy-and-hold investor: I buy pretty much only what’s on my ETF all-stars list.
- I hold USD denominated ETFs.
- I need to easily (and preferably quickly) move money to and from my bank account. My “how I get paid in retirement” scheme necessitates at least monthly money moves.
- I need a way to cheaply convert USD to CAD. Because I have a fair bit of retirement holdings in USD.
- I need to be able to easily manage accounts that are held in my spouse’s name
- I have a bunch of different accounts (RRIFs, Spousal RRIFs, TFSAs, non-registered accounts) and being able to quickly see which is which is highly desirable.
- I’d like the ability to use a mobile app to do the tasks I need to do.
The TL/DR here is that Questrade meets my needs, but there is certainly a lot of room for improvement, especially in the domain of managing accounts for which you have been granted trading authority.
With that in mind, let’s see how Questrade stacks up.
Platform General Thoughts
I spend about half my time using the web interface2, and half using the mobile app. I have not bothered with the “desktop” app3 because I move from computer to Chromebook too frequently for that to be useful.
Questrade serves two rather different market niches. Investors like me are one, and high-frequency traders are another. There are two different web interfaces for these two audiences, called “My Portal” and “Edge Web”, respectively. I’d be happy to stick with “My Portal” (it’s the prettier interface) but am forced to use Edge Web in order to access accounts in my spouse’s name. The integration of the two is very clunky. Useable, but not pretty.
I’ve experienced a few issues with the web platform, and I don’t seem to be the only one:
- There are random, reasonably frequent logouts (or partial logouts, where you can’t see any of your accounts)
- Saving banking information for EFT deposit/withdrawal gets broken pretty frequently
The mobile app is more polished, but only offers a subset of the features of the web interface. Whether this impacts you or not will generally only be discovered when you want to do something and can’t find it in the mobile app. (e.g. currency conversion, accessing accounts your spouse owns). In my experience, lots of development time and effort goes into improving mobile apps, so shortcomings reported here may be gone by the time you try them out.
A quick word about security. Questrade offers the option to do 2FA using an authenticator app4 which I appreciate. Phone discussions with agents also rely on 2FA, but here you need to have access to your mobile phone since they only do SMS.
Fees: Excellent
Questrade charges no fees to buy or sell any stocks or ETFs. This is most excellent. They do charge a $9.95 journaling fee which is required in order to pull off a Norbert’s gambit but since this is not something I do frequently, it’s a small annoyance. It’s still way cheaper than converting USD to CAD using Questrade’s “Exchange” feature.
One quirk that I found annoying is that Questrade charges $25 if you want to donate shares to a charity. Seems a little mean-spirited, and discourages smallish donations, something I had been wanting to do.
And the other quirk is that there is no way to buy HISAs without paying a transaction fee. Of course there are substitute ETFs you can buy instead (e.g. CASH, HISA) but they skim off MER fees. That’s the main reason ZMMK and ICSH are now in my portfolio.
Trading interface: Meh
It works well enough, but it feels like I have to click around a lot to get things done. And there are some annoyances:
- Good: The web interface allows you to automatically set a limit price equal to either the Bid or the Ask price, which is a nice touch. That’s not offered in the mobile app.
- Bad: The interface won’t calculate the max number of shares of your chosen ETF you can buy with cash on hand5.
- Bad: For margin accounts6 the interface favours displaying “buying power” over “cash on hand” which of course encourages margin trades. I suppose this is understandable, but not what I want to see.
- Meh: for all the web space Questrade dedicates to fractional trading, none of the ETFs I routinely buy and sell are eligible for fractional trading7. This isn’t a big deal to me but figured I’d mention it since Questrade likes to promote this capability so heavily.
CAD/USD support: Good
Questrade’s accounts (e.g. TFSA, RRIF) allow you to hold both CAD and USD assets simultaneously. The interface is very flexible on how your assets are displayed in your accounts:
- You can show JUST CAD assets by selecting “CAD” (and this hides the USD ones)
- You can show JUST USD assets by selecting “USD” (and this hides the CAD ones)
- You can show ALL your assets in CAD or USD by selecting “”combined in CAD” or “combined in USD”
Two things I have not tried
- a RRIF withdrawal in USD (although the support pages say this is supported)
- Native conversion between USD and CAD (supported by the interface, but presumably expensive8)
Moving Money: Good
Moving money between accounts and moving money to my USD and CAD bank accounts is easy with EFTs. I use Bill Pay from my bank account for TFSA contributions. All seem to work quite well, as long as the interface doesn’t “forget” your already linked bank account, which is a problem that’s cropped up a few times in the past few months.
Using trading authority: Terrible
Setting up trading authority in Questrade was a royal PITA…forms to fill out and upload, and then special enablement links, secret passwords…very labour-intensive. And then? From the web interface, you are forced to use the Edge Web platform if you want to trade on your spouse’s accounts. This interface hides the carefully crafted nicknames you’ve chosen in the “My Portal” view of things, so this is just barely usable.
You are also not able to move money involving your spouse’s accounts, even if the bank account is jointly held. This isn’t how my former provider (QTrade) handled things, and this feels like a significant downgrade.
If you use Passiv, it’s actually a much better view of you/your spouse’s combined accounts. Passiv Elite is moving behind the paywall of Questrade Plus, so you won’t be able to trade using Passiv unless you pony up for the subscription fee. But the combined view is nice, something you can’t get with Questrade’s own platform.
Forms: Meh
Although most of the forms are now done with (trading authority were the last ones I had to deal with), there are still forms for day to day management. RESP withdrawals for instance require a form. Searching for forms you need is reasonably straightforward but auto-population of form fields that Questrade knows (e.g. like account number, sometimes names/addresses) isn’t a thing. So it’s just busywork.
What’s nice is you can see the status of submitted forms from the web interface (not mobile) and you get prompt notification when forms are processed via email.
One big annoyance with the account setup process is that the automated emails generated by the document workflow do not reference the account number. So if you’re submitting multiple forms for multiple accounts, there’s no way of knowing which one is having a problem unless you log in to the web, and even then you are generally given a one liner description of the problem that may or may not be meaningful to you.
And you cannot submit forms on behalf of your spouse.
Support: Meh
Although I was initially excited about a support feature based on chat, the day to day use of it has been less than stellar. I always feel that the agents staffing chat are less knowledgeable. So now I rely on the phone when I need to talk to somebody.
Questrade Reserve exists if you have a larger balance and trade frequently which gives you access to a “better” support team. Although I don’t qualify since I don’t trade enough, I think I’ve somehow been included in this service. (It might be temporary, part of the transition time as Questrade Plus rolls out. I covered that here).
During their promo it was downright painful, to get a hold of someone, but in “normal” times it’s generally pretty easy to get a hold of someone who can help. Perhaps avoid calling during busy times of the year (promos, RRSP deadline, end of year).
Reporting: Meh
The Questrade built-in reporting is pretty basic, but it’s fine. I don’t really rely on it. The included access to Passiv is a much better tool for visualising your portfolio across multiple accounts. QTrade (my former broker) had much better tools in this domain.
All in all, the money involved with making the switch more than outweighs the new annoyances I have to deal with. I have found the Questrade subreddit a good place to keep tabs on what’s going on at Questrade. Questions? Your thoughts? Let me know at comments@moneyengineer.ca.
- As a retired person, I don’t pull in a traditional salary so I look at form-filling for cash as a way to contribute to our household’s net income. ↩︎
- Various browsers, various platforms with no real discernible difference in user experience. There are actually TWO web interfaces that are jerry-rigged together — the pretty one (Portal) and the “powerful” one (Edge). ↩︎
- AKA “Edge Desktop” per https://www.questrade.com/self-directed-investing/active-trader#advanced-platforms-and-tools ↩︎
- Including MS Authenticator, Google Authenticator, Apple’s Passwords ↩︎
- Unlike Wealthsimple. ↩︎
- And I had to open margin accounts in order to get a joint non-registered account with Questrade. On my to-do list is to see whether I can convert them to non-margin joint accounts or not. ↩︎
- Unlike Wealthsimple, if you’re keeping score ↩︎
- And it looks like you CANNOT convert between USD and CAD from the mobile app. Annoying. ↩︎
The Money Engineer 